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Who the piper?
Page 73
Page 74
Page 75
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Subsidy or not, services to the Highlands and Islands are essential to prevent another depopulation of Scotland's North West
FEW HAULIERS would not welcome an increase of 10,500 tons in their traffic during the next 12 months. And such an increase is the seemingly happy prospect facing MacBrayne Haulage Ltd., which from this week will fall heir to the' last of the freight traffic, carried by the shipping company Caledonian MacBrayne, to the Western Isles of Scotland when the last of its three vessels, SS Lochcarron, goes out of service.
by lain Sherrill
From 197 I MacBrayne Haulage has increased its traffic to the Western Isles from 20,000 tons to 73,000 tons last year. During the same period the seaborne traffic has declined by 24,000 tons thus accounting for nearly half of MacBrayne's increased road traffic. Much of the remaining 29,000 tons has been won over from own account operators and other haulage contractors who have found the run to the islands uneconomic.
Whereas the Transport Act 1968 makes provision in Section 34 for ferries and bus services to remote areas to he subsidised by way of grant or loan, no such provision applies to road freight services. Increasing costs and an imbalance of traffic have caused almost all of the own-account operators and all of the hire and reward operators to abandon the service to the Outer Hebrides.
This year the shipping service received a subsidy of £2.5m. Now that the service has been withdrawn this vast amount of money will be saved, but the road operator cannot look for any spin off. The truth is that the road operator never has benefitted from a subsidy except perhaps in as much as the sea rate he was charged rose by 5 per cent last year and not by the 65 per cent that would have been necessary had the grant not been made to the shipping company, However, the state ment of the Secretary of State for Scotland on the matter is careful to point out: -Sixty-five per cent is more than users can be expected to pay in a single increase.So MacBrayne Haulage cannot feel safe from vastly increased freight charges in the future Against this backcloth it is little wonder that they are the principal road transport operators running a feeder service to this remote part of Britain. They are required to provide a scheduled service, carry under RHA conditions of carriage, charge commercial rates, aim at a margin of profit and at the same time cope with an imbalance of traffic.
Despite all these constraints, the company managed to finish 1974 only £75,000 in the red. Last year was a period of rampant inflation and in addition there was the haulage drivers' dispute, which resulted in four weeks' loss of use and a £1 an hour award.
Mr lain MacLean, MacBrayne's md, would undoubtedly have welcomed the acceptance of the proposal by the Highlands and Islands Development Board that a road-related tariff should apply to all ferry traffic between the Scottish mainland and the islands. Using CM's Tables of Operating Costs the HIDB made out a case for their proposal last year and again this year; on both occasions they were turned down by the Government.
If accepted, the plan would have meant that the average rate per mile for any weight of vehicle on mainland work would have applied to offshore ro-ro traffic. The plan was supported in principle by Mr Donald Stewart, MP for the Western Isles, who backed his support with figures. He quoted me £170 for 20 tons from Stornoway to Ullapool, a 50-mile sea route. The road-related rates would be about £25. "Through their taxes the islanders subsidise motorway building and British Railways losses and they have neither motorways nor railways," says Mr Stewart. "Why should we therefore be expected to pay full freight charges?"
A native of the Hebrides, Mr MacLean is able to identify himself with his customers and understand their freight problems. Those of his staff I met at the 41-acre depot in Blochairn Road, Glasgow, appear to have been influenced by his approach to the job. They see serving some remote location with essential traffic as perhaps something more like a social service than a job, and this attitude travels from the traffic office and loading bank staffs right through to the drivers. For example, as Mr MacLean conducted me round the • sword-tooth loading bank we came on a driver with lOcwt of tomatoes consigned by •a Glasgow fruit merchant to various drops in Uist. The merchant had failed to make advance arrangements, he had no account with MacBrayne, the driver was a hired-in haulage contractor's man and he had no cash. Inside 20 minutes the fruit merchant had been contacted, the necessary credit rating established and the load was being carried across the bank to the night trunker. Any profit on that consignment must surely have been gobbled up on the telephone calls and special invoicing which followed. Nevertheless, •an essential service was supplied.
There are 14 vehicles engaged on night trunking opera • tions out of Glasgow carrying anything from ship's anchors to tomatoes, and tyres to fairy cakes. Throughout the day MacBrayne's own collection and delivery fleet is gathering in consignments in excess of 3 tons, but 60 per cent of all the traffic is delivered to the loading bank either by the own-account operators or local carriers. Consignments over 4 tons are charged to include the C,& t:o and long-haul elements of the operation.
24 hour ro-ro
Whereas by ship from the Clyde consignments might have taken three, four or five days, by road and ro-ro ferry they are delivered in 24 hours. I watched goods being received in Glasgow and 24 hours later saw them discharged at Lochboisdale.
The night trunkers have three change-over points—at Oban, Fort William and Ullapool. This means that each man can do one return leg of his journey inside a normal eightor nine-hour day; the operation will therefore be unaffected if and when we adopt the EEC hours regulations.
Empty trailers are placed on the outward side of the load Mg bank at 6am and loaded during the day; they leave for the ferry, ports at 8pm. One of the great advantages of night trunking is undoubtedly that the long, winding road along the side of Loch Lomond and the narrower roads to Fort William and Ullapool are almost traffic free, The schedule nevertheless applies equally well through the long, light summer nights of the north as it does to the treacherous blizzards of the winter.
A close neighbour of MacBrayne Haulage is Scottish Road Services, in both a geographical and a company sense, Mr MacLean makes good use of this "family connection;" he buys his slave tractors for his depots and harbours from SRS redundant stock.
The bulk of MacBrayne's return-load traffic is wool and tweed. However, from the island of Barra there is an increasing volume of shell grit used for rough casting and this is estimated to take about 500 trailers this year, thus reducing the imbalance a little. By next August the new " Barratlantic " fish-processing plant will be in operation at Northbay Barra and this should see refrigerated trailers of lobster, crab and other sea food for London markets reducing that imbalance still further.
Even in the sector of transport where the Section 34 subsidy does apply, all is not well. In the remote village of Daiavich in Argyll, 15 miles into the hills to the west of A82, the firm of L. F. Stewart & Son, coach operator, is running a stage service to the main road, a schools service to Oban, is losing £500 a year and is not in receipt of grant. It spent £150 pursuing an application for a road service licence through to Oban and had it refused in •the face of opposition from the Scottish Transport Group company, Highland Omnibuses.
I understand that Mr Stewart's case can be repeated many times in remote parts of Britain. He told me he has approached the county council about a grant, but on each occasion his requesthad been turned down in principle before an application had been officially made.
The refusal of the road service licence is even more difficult to comprehend. It had been Mr Stewart's intention to lift passengers from the remote villages between Dalavich and Taynuilt and carry them through to Oban together with the schoolchildren. "The Corn bine "—the Highlanders' description of Highland Omnibuses —opposed the application. The Commissioners refused it; the last few miles of his proposed route coincided with the Highland Omnibuses route. But Mr Stewart was confused. His schools !ervice, on which he intended to carry fare-paying passengers to Oban, arrives at the main road 15 minutes after Highland Omnibuses service has passed on its way to Oban, 10 miles along the road, so there could be no connection.
In the evening his schools bus is back at the road end 40 minutes before the regular service arrives from Oban, which means too long a wait for tired schoolchildren. The result is not only a loss of revenue to Stewart, but it means that this remote section of the community, which the 1968 Act was supposed to provide for, is denied the opportunity of travelling to Oban unless it does so by private car.
I spoke to Mr W.. G. Steel, traffic manager of Highland Omnibuses in Inverness, who said : "I don't want to say too much; the case was abandoned and I do not wish to prejudice any future hearing."
Self-subsidised
Mr Ken Cameron, who was a transport officer at HIDB at the time of the application, is almost as confused as Mr Stewart. " Possibly these small operators in remote areas are. unable to cope with the legal jargon which surrounds applications," he said, "but that is no reason why they should be penalised."
In the meantime, Mr Stewart continues to run his bus collecting parcels from Taynuilt delivered by Scottish Road Services and National Carriers Ltd, and picking up packages from Oban which his would-be passengers are deprived of collecting for themselves. The service is being subsidised, in that much of the profit from his three 32-ton ERFs which are engaged in carrying timber from Inverlever Forest to the Corpach Pulp Mills at Fort William helps to keep the bus on the road.
Less than 15 miles away Hugh Macon. of Benderloch has a different story to tell. He inherited a 53-year-old licence from a fellow operator and now operates a service between Easdale and Oban. He is the official carrier between British Railways station in Oban and Easdale. In the winter his main traffic is the schools service, but he emphasised that he was licensed to carry anything except mail. He has the unique distinction of being the only coach operator to run a service which crosses the Atlantic—Easdale is an island joined to •the mainland by one of General Wade's famous hump-backed bridges.
His service is subsidised and he states quite categorically : "If there were no grant there would be no service."
Added Mr Macoll : "I could just as easily live without it."
Macoll's fleet comprises two Ford Viceroys, two Bedford Super Vegas and one Albion Firefly. They are engaged on tours around the Oban area throughout the summer and in the winter almost all are in constant service with local organisations attending evening functions as far away as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Stirling. In addition he has seasonal traffic, moving trawler fishermen during the herring season to Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Grimsby, Fleetwood and Girvan, In a community like Benderloch, with a 600 population, he is dependent to a large extent on Oban five miles away. He claims that the personal touch is his ace card. I suspect that the no-deposit clause in his contract must be the king, queen and jack in his hand.
The population of South Uist is even more remote and more widely scattered than that of the Argyll mainland, but nevertheless MacAulay Brothers find their eight 15seater Bedfords fully occupied. With true Hebridean modesty Donald John MacAulay, the proprietor, said: "We took over MacBrayne's six years ago; at that time we only had one bus."
He was, of course, referring to the fact that MacBrayne's bus services on the island were withdrawn and he was left with a clear field to supply the education authority with seven buses for school runs morning and evening. The other bus is used on a service run twice a day between the airfield at Benbecula and Lochboisdale. On Sunday all eight buses are used to take the parishioners to church. Thinking • of the excise men in Compton Mackenzie's novel Whisky Galore I asked Donald John MacAulay: "Do you ever see the IVIoT examiners ? "
"Now and then they come but we never have any trouble," he replied without a blush.